MOG Lands Deal With Verizon, Will Come Preinstalled On All 4G Android Phones

Here’s some big news for MOG, the premium music service that lets you pay $10 a month to stream an unlimited number of songs to your computer and your mobile devices (the mobile apps also let you download entire albums to your phone and save them locally, which is very handy).

Today the company has announced that it’s landed a deal with Verizon, and it’s a big one: MOG will come preinstalled on all 4G Verizon Android phones. MOG will also be featured in Verizon’s V CAST app store, and users will be able to sign up for MOG accounts using Verizon carrier billing.

This is a big win for MOG, which has the challenge of convincing people to pay for a subscription music service (no easy feat) and is up against some strong competitors like Rdio and Spotify (if it ever launches in the US). The exposure to millions of Verizon users will be nice, and I suspect that many people are going to be eager to ‘test’ their 4G connections as soon as they get their hands on a phone that supports it — mass downloading of albums sounds like a good place to start. And carrier billing is key too, as users won’t have to pull out their credit cards.

Verizon will almost certainly be taking a chunk of MOG’s revenues for users that sign up via the preinstalled app, but in the long term this may prove worth it. At this point we’re in a sort of landgrab for streaming music service customers — each service will eventually have very similar libraries (they already do in most cases), and users may well stick with the same provider for years.